"Operation Foxley" was a plot to assassinate Hitler in his own back garden, using a crack shot sniper and top-secret intel fed to Britain by a German prisoner... so why didn't we pull the trigger?
HIDDEN among the tall trees and fallen leaves and wearing a suit of woodland camo, an elite British sniper lines up the shot which could end World War Two and bring Nazi Germany to its knees.
On his daily morning walk through the Bavarian forest, Adolf Hitler strolls right into the agent's cross-hairs, and a squeeze of the trigger is all it takes to wipe the world's most evil man from the face of the earth.
At least, that was the plan, cooked up by the British military's most daring strategists in the June of 1944, the penultimate year of WW2.
"Operation Foxley" was the name given to a plot to assassinate Hitler in his own back garden, using a crack shot sniper and top-secret intel fed to Britain by a German prisoner.
The plan was so well-guarded that details only started to emerge in the late 1990s, half a century after it was scheduled to go ahead, and even today few people know how close British bullets came to killing Hitler.
But now the whole story is being told in a new doc by Yesterday, which pores over declassified files to reveal the incredible tale of Operation Foxley... and reveals the reason why we never pulled the trigger on the despised Nazi leader.
Operation Foxley was born in the waning years of World War Two, with the Fuhrer refusing to give in despite the Allies gaining the upper hand on almost every front.
Millions more would die before Allied troops could strike into the heart of the Third Reich and force an end to the war, so top bods in the British military explored a different option: killing its leader.
A top secret military organisation called the Special Operation Executive (SOE) had been tasked with "setting Europe ablaze" by PM Winston Churchill himself, and it was naturally this shadowy group which came up with the blueprint for Operation Foxley.
SOE, in existence from 1940 to 1946, operated in the high-stakes realm between warfare and espionage, and they had become experts in kidnappings, infiltration and sabotage during the war.
Often dubbed "Churchill's Secret Army" or the "Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare", SOE operated throughout occupied territory, and was the organisation responsible for abducting Nazi General Heinrich Kreipe from Crete.
The film Ill Met By Moonlight dramatises this kidnapping, and SOE also crops up in war flicks like Bridge On The River Kwai, Where Eagles Dare and Operation Daybreak, about the SOE's assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, SS chief Heinrich Himmler's understudy.
Roderick Bailey, a warfare historian at Oxford University, told Sun Online: "Alongside the gadgets, disguises, camouflage and weapons, SOE used assassination as a tool.
"It's no coincidence that Ian Fleming worked in Naval Intelligence before he wrote Bond and would have known about the things SOE was coming up with at the time.
"For Fleming it was just fiction, but the reality of SOE is more interesting: they were involved in kidnapping German generals, helping the resistance carry out sabotage and sponsoring the assassination of Nazi officials."
The group sent their agents into covert ops behind enemy lines with gadgets straight out of a Bond film: silent guns hidden in coat sleeves and pens which could deploy tear gas when you clicked them.
But SOE would need its very best commandos to carry out a plan as ambitious as Operation Foxley - Hitler had a knack for surviving attempts on his life, and had dodged death on 25 separate occasions during the war.
Every time someone tried to kill him, his schedule would change and carry him away from danger, a bullet would jam in an agent's pistol, or a bomb's detonator would fail to work, and Hitler would walk away in one piece.
But Operation Foxley could have been different.
In Mission: Kill Hitler, WW2 expert Timothy Ryback estimates that Operation Foxley could have been carried out with 99 per cent certainty of making the kill.
The idea came from info leaked to us by a colonel in the French resistance, who was planning his own assassination independently of SOE.
This colonel had learned that Hitler was holed up in a French chateaux, and contacted SOE to recommend that the house be bombed before the Fuhrer was moved to another location.
Hitler left France before the plan could go ahead, but the plot attracted Churchill's attention and sparked a desire to devise his own assassination plan.
"Churchill was a man who would consider everything," historian Roderick Bailey told us, and thus Operation Foxley was born.
It was decided that Hitler's Berghof residence in the Bavarian mountains, where he regularly spent free time with his girlfriend, Eva Braun, would be the best place to catch him unawares.
Hitler relaxed while he was in the mountains, and security was to be loosened inside the walls of the compound which enclosed his home.
Catch the Fuhrer off-guard, SOE reasoned, and an agent could easily kill him as he unwound in the Berghof.
The hard bit would be knowing when to strike, but we had a trick up our sleeves: a sympathetic prisoner of war.
The Brits had captured a German soldier who used to work on Hitler's personal guard, and he was able to provide SOE with details of his former leader's daily routine while he was in Bavaria.
The guard explained that Hitler would start every day at the Berghof with a 20-minute walk in the woods, just after 10am.
Hitler would walk alone, or with a few of his associates, and his SS guards would hover back, out of sight, to allow their leader some time to himself.
"It was the one place in the world where he could have that sense of freedom and openness," Timothy Ryback explains.
So it was decided that this two-kilometre morning walk would present the best chance of killing Hitler, offering a clean shot for any sniper who could infiltrate Bavaria and sneak into the woods around the Berghof.
SOE decided to dress one of their agents as a Nazi soldier, arm him with a German Mauser sniper rifle and a bag full of grenades, and parachute him in nearby, following a route planned to lead him right up to the Fuhrer's path.
He would have to dodge security patrols and cut his way through the perimeter fence, but the undercover British commando could theoretically get his sniper rifle to within 200m of Adolf Hitler - close enough for an easy kill.
Embedded in the trees, the assassin would have the perfect shot: his target would be unguarded, alone and ambling along at walking pace.
The mission would almost certainly be a one-way trip, and SOE had a tough time deciding who would be the right man for the job.
They needed a German-speaking elite sniper who was willing to give his life to take Hitler's, and toyed with the idea of recruiting a 25-year-old British Captain called Edmund Bennett.
Roderick told us: "Bennett was an expert in small arms who knew how to handle weapons.
"He was a serious man who was willing to go ahead with this dangerous mission, and that says a lot about him."
But by the time the operation had been fully planned and Bennett had been lined up for the job, it was 1945 and the war looked to be coming to a natural end.
By now, Churchill was rightly convinced that victory was just around the corner, and SOE quietly shelved their elaborate assassination plan just as it was coming together.
All along, Operation Foxley had divided opinion within the British military, and resistance from within as well as the complexity of the operation slowed its development considerably.
Even at this late stage, the fear was that by killing Hitler, he would be made a martyr, or that he would be replaced by a more competent strategist who could drag out the war even longer.
So Operation Foxley was never be carried out - Hitler did the SOE's job for them and shot himself, and his girlfriend, in his Berlin bunker on April 30 1945.
SOE was disbanded a year later, and it took many decades more for the information on its secret operations to leak into the public.
To this day, nobody knows who ordered the plug to be pulled on Operation Foxley, or whether Edmund Bennett would have been able to make the kill.
We also don't know whether Hitler's death would have emboldened the flagging German army, or if it could have brought the war to an end sooner.
But we do know that the crack of a sniper shot in the Bavarian forest would have changed the course of history forever, and that Hitler came closer to a swifter death than anyone realised.
Mission: Kill Hitler airs tomorrow, Wednesday 28 March at 8pm on Yesterday, and will be available to catch-up on .
